Tag Archives: energy

Crystals

Context: I asked my grandmother, 75, white, lives in North Idaho, about crystals and her belief around them. All through my childhood they have been around, whether as gifts at Christmas or just around the house. I knew they were spiritual in some way but wanted to know the greater context. My grandmother works as a spiritual life coach, working to bring people’s lives into balance. She is in the herbalist community and learned a lot of what she knows through classes she took. She still operates in that community and shares knowledge with her friends. 

Grandma: “I believe there is, how do I say it? There’s an energy within them. And I don’t know if it’s a… conscious. So out there in the field, scientists are looking at what is conscious, consciousness, consciousness in animals, consciousness in plants, consciousness in rocks, in crystals. So they’re looking at it. So they’re just asking all these questions. So somehow, I believe, there is an energy that I can ask for and draw on. That’s pretty up here because I can’t, I can’t give you the right, the right words to come down for that. Um, But for example, there’s a, there’s a crystal and I’ve forgotten the name of it, and I may have even given your mom one. So it has 2 pointy ends on it. And the idea is that you can hold it and connect with it, and it’s the crystal doing the work, whether you’re channeling through something. It, you know, it’s it’s not me, but but I can take this crystal and I can take a pointy end and I can point that energy at my shoulder or at your shoulder. And with intent, So intention is coming through that. For those for healing, but healing is reminding the cells, what their job is.” 

Analysis: This is definitely non-traditional folk medicine that is going about healing in a different way than Western Medicine, removing all separation between body and soul. Instead relying on soul and on energy to heal people. It’s about a belief in a larger energy that connects us all and figuring out how to channel it. It makes sense that crystals are used for this purpose. Crystallization happens naturally, grows up from nature making it a perfect conduit back into that nature. They are also not as rare and expensive as other jewels are, allowing them to be accessible and cost effective, which might be why they are so commonly used as a conduit to the spiritual. It shows a belief in something bigger, but also doesn’t reject science (though I haven’t researched how true her claims are), just kinda collaborates with it which I think speaks a lot to non-traditional medicine.

Tapping

Text: My grandma has an exercise where she taps on different parts of the face and body (as demonstrated by the picture she drew.

She says it’s sort of a three part process:

These points are meridian end points. She says that when you tap on them they stimulate these points (and your body) and your cortisol level is brought down, which you produce when you get stressed, anxious, emotional (there’s another thing it produces but she couldn’t remember). Cortisol isn’t good for your immune system, it makes it work harder.

When you tap for 5 minutes, it starts to bring it down. When you tap for more than 5 minutes, then it starts to train it to stay down a little bit further.

My grandma says in her practice (and she said there’s a lot of ways people do it) when she taps, someone might be really really, really sad or really angry. So they get to talk about it and get to bring that energy up so now they’re feeling the sadness. With that feeling you tap on all that sadness, feel it and it brings things down. You don’t have to tell your story or talk aloud, though sometimes it helps to hear it aloud. But when you tap on that sadness, what it does (and she said she was simplifying things) is it allows that frontal cortex to open up so it’s not clouded with cortisol.

Then skipping ahead she personifies it, and she talked me through personification. When you talk to your body your body feels validated, it’s saying” Oh, you hear me? I am sad. Let me tell you why I’m sad.” Even though we personify it, that energy comes up, because it’s been going around and around in you, so in your intellect you keep it there. But as your tapping what happens is, as said before, your frontal cortex opens and it starts to integrate your nervous system with your thought process. 

So now you can acknowledge that sadness, honor it, but you don’t have to hang onto it. When you’re ready then you can tap and say, I choose to allow this sadness to release, or I choose to transform this sadness. 

Context: My grandmother is 75, white, and living in Idaho. She works as a spiritual life coach, working to bring people’s lives into balance. She is in the herbalist community and learned a lot of what she knows through classes she took. She still operates in that community and shares knowledge with her friends. She learned this in a class around 21-22 years ago where a woman came to talk about tapping.

She says tapping is an old ancient system from a lot of places, but she’s gonna pull some Chinese traditional–and maybe five element Chinese uses it too but she’s not sure. What it is, is you tap on meridian points that come out of the chakras, which are like spinning vortexes of energy. The meridians are part of the network that carry that energy. This network is invisible, like the blood vessels in your body are part of the circulatory system, the meridians are part of that energy/chakra system in your nervous system.

Analysis: Tapping is a type of folk healing that rejects the Cartesian Dualism separation of the soul and body, instead grounding yourself and what you’re going through in both the body and the soul. It has more of a focus on the mental and spiritual aspect, in some ways leaning more towards therapy than other medical practices but still recognizes the body’s part and the importance of grounding a person through the physical tapping of the meridian endpoints. Tapping also seems to loosely act out Rappaport model of ritual referenced in “Placebo Studies and Ritual Healing”: evocation, enactment, embodiment and evaluation. Evocation: This one’s a little optional depending on if you’re leading or doing taping informally, but for my grandma’s patients starting the session and trusting her to lead them through. Enactment: The actual act of tapping, letting it bring down the cortisol levels, the five plus minute duration you tap for. Embodiment: Personifying your feelings, integrating your body and nervous system with your thought process, sometimes saying it out loud. Evaluation: Allowing your feelings to release or transform.

In this we also see what might be cultural appropriation and probably a little white washing, though folk healing is an interesting thing to examine through the lens of cultural appropriation: Is it just a recognition of systems that helps to heal thus everyone should use it? or is it people taking and reshaping (presumable) something that belongs to another culture?

Citations: Kaptchuk, Ted J. “Placebo Studies and Ritual Theory: A Comparative Analysis of Navajo, Acupuncture and Biomedical Healing.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 366, no. 1572, June 2011, pp. 1849–58. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0385.

Thoughts Superstition

Nationality: Chinese American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Pasadena, CA
Primary Language: English

Text/Interview:

DS: “Here’s a superstition I live by. Every time I think of something negative, I knock on wood three times. If I don’t see any wood, then I knock on my head. It’s all about the transfer of energy. I’m literally trying to knock the bad energy out so it can be replaced with positive energy.”

Context:

DS does not define himself as a spiritual person; however, he does believe in good and bad energy. He wholeheartedly believes in this superstition. DS’s mother first told him this superstition when he was a child and he has lived by it ever since. He is unsure of its origins; however, he does not believe it has to do with his Chinese roots. Instead, it is simply a personal superstition that everyone in his family performs daily.

My Interpretation:

This appears to be a case of Sympathetic Magic. In knocking on wood or his head, DS is expelling the bad energy and leaving room for the good energy to flow. This falls under the Law of Contact, as the action being performed is creating the magical effect. Personally, I think this is a very interesting superstition. I always knew the superstition ‘knock on wood’ but had never heard of someone doing the same with their head. I feel like this helps to illuminate the meaning of the superstition and why it still holds weight to this day.

Annotation:

As this is a famous superstition, there are many variations of it within the popular culture. For further research, be sure to check out this Ted-Ed article:

LaBrascio, Lisa, and Stuart Vyse. “Why Do We Knock on Wood?” TED, May 19, 2017. https://blog.ed.ted.com/2017/05/18/why-do-we-knock-on-wood/.